Are Your Friends' Cheerful Facebook Status Updates Making You Miserable?
By Lexi Petronis, Glamour magazine
When you're having one of those black-raincloud-over-the-head bad days, there's one thing that you should absolutely not do, according to new research--and, for a lot of us, it might be kind of difficult to avoid...
Do not log onto Facebook.
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Why? A series of experiments at Stanford University has discovered that, if we're feeling miserable, reading our friends' cheerful status updates will probably only make us even more miserable.
The experiments had some key revelations in their findings, including: 1) we hide our negative emotions and promote our positive ones (which explains why there are so many happy or self-promoting status updates out there); and 2) we usually assume everyone else is happier than they actually are. "Taken together," say the researchers, "these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are."
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In other words: misery would really love some company. (But maybe not too much--is over-sharing on Facebook ever a good thing?)
Do super-cheery status updates ever make you feel anything but? What kinds of updates do you post--happy? Sad? Honest?
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Photo Credit: Condé Nast Digital Studio
